Toronto would rather eat at The Gravy Train than derail Rob Ford

The crowd-funding campaign has just been launched for a Toronto eatery called The Gravy Train — a restaurant dedicated to gravy, whose preferred form of transportation was something Rob Ford pledged to stop when he successfully ran for mayor.

But in their effort to raise $20,000 before opening their doors, the dippers behind the venture have distanced themselves from any political stance: “Use your mouth to eat and laugh, not to argue!,” concludes the pitch on the website Indiegogo. “Right, left — it doesn’t matter which hand holds your fork while you’re eating our food.”

For a growing number of Torontonians, that is precisely the problem with the city, even as Ford continues to test its patience with antics like unrepentantly missing two-and-a-half hours of a council meeting to coach a high school football game. But this kind of slacktivism is exactly what we have to thank for Rob Ford in the first place.

The lack of a successful opponent during the 2010 election had much to do with the fact that few thought they had to rally behind one when gravy train talk first started rolling.

Nothing reflected the slacktivist attitude better than the emergence of a Facebook group titled “500,000 Voters for a Rob Ford Free Toronto” — which has about 20,000 disenchanted members two years later. With a total of 813,984 voters going to the polls in the last municipal election, of which 47% favoured the winner, expecting even a half-million to click a “Like” icon was a bit naive.

Criticism of Ford may not be hard to find, even if the Angus Reid poll commissioned by the Toronto Star last month could be spun to show his support slipping, while this latest incident that involved police ordering a TTC bus to drive his teenage players from the tense playoff game will certainly not help his standing with even the staunchest supporters — even the ones on council.

Yet these questions have yet to be channeled into any message that Ford himself can grasp. Speculation that MP Olivia Chow — whose late husband Jack Layton was sincerely praised by the mayor after his death last year, despite political differences — could attempt to return to City Hall to take over the big chair in 2014 are mostly laughed off by those who think her perspective on the city begins and ends with her downtown ward.

Those passively watching Toronto municipal follies across the country must assume by now that there are protests, meetings and uprisings afoot to ensure a new mayor takes over 24 months from now. But that would require motivating the most passionate opponents to take a break from Twitter and converse in the same room.